"[your friend] likes Salitos!"
"[the same friend] likes Salitos!"
... a week later "[your friend] likes Salitos!"
Again for emphasis, Facebook isn't going away. People share more than ever and use it daily, but they are getting bored with it so a new opening for another timesink has been created. For example, all of the people I know that use Pinterest also use Facebook. Pinterest is a newer timesink, but it doesn't replace Facebook.
They use a mix of communication applications and media rich social networks such as Instagram.
But I guess you could say Instagram is Facebook in one respect.
Once in a while I do check my Facebook account on the web. Sometimes I upload few pics for my (all) friends to see, otherwise my photo sharing is restricted to Dropbox mostly.
I tried to leave but couldn't, for the same reason as yours.
I was the only one of my friends who had a FB profile - everyone else was on Myspace. I visited Myspace daily at the time.
I remember when the shift happened. More and more of my friend posted Myspace bulletins with "Deleting my Myspace, add me on FB!" It seemed to happen all at once.
I've seen a few of these 'leaving' declarations on my FB, but there isn't the same rush. FB may be going through a Myspace fate at a much slower rate, or perhaps we are in a new day and age where users will have profiles on many different social networks. I tend to think it's the latter.
We have a private group for my family, and I aggresively filter people and software from my feed.
It works really well to keep "connected" and know what they're up to, but I do try to call semi-regularly. It's hard on me since I can't afford to visit them :( .
I probably should do a heavy culling of old classmates, but Facebook hardly shows me photos of their babies anyways :) .
I've being thinking a lot about this because I am trying to solve this problem of noise and focus in friendships with my startup.
I started using twitter a lot more a few months ago after getting bored with FB.
These are largely the "next older" generation, after the ten and twenty-somethings that, per all the recent reporting, have moved on to Twitter, Tumblr, or... I guess, the next "T".
So... I have no objective evaluation, but it's certainly becoming a less interesting place to me, even to keep up with "non-technical friends".
Also... I'm increasingly hesitant to comment on public posts. People who "market" themselves with public posts, further discourage my participation. (NOT that I want the post security setting indicator taken away. It's the only thing that, when not public, prompts me to comment at all.)
1) Nobody I know outside of techy-majors (I'm in college now) uses Twitter. 2) Everyone uses either Facebook or Instagram. 3) As many people use Tumblr as people use Twitter (but not limited to just people interested in tech)
I am very wary when people assert that Facebook is not cool anymore and is going to be replaced. Sure, it's not cool anymore. Then again, texting is not "cool." It's basically assumed you have a Facebook in the same sense that it's assumed you are willing to receive texts.
Keep in mind that all those meme-y, "Confessions"-type pages proliferate precisely because they are addictive time-sinks for teenaged and college-student users.
Therefor, I've been going more than a bit by what I've seen others writing in the press and blogging. Never an entirely trustworthy source of information.
Perhaps I'm part of an atypical graph. And/or the recent FB news feed jiggering has decreased my perceived quality.
My own reaction is probably primarily one of privacy. I don't get super-paranoid, but I don't want to be blatting my personal interactions all over a fully public, searchable interface.
It suddenly occurs to me to ask: The press -- more a few years ago than recently -- reports on different generational perspectives towards privacy including online. (As in, younger people... are more ready to take on the nuances, if not that they are simple unconcerned, as some perhaps misinforming reporting has claimed.)
I also read recently that a major attraction of Tumblr has been pseudonyms. You tell your friends what your Tumblr ID is, but you don't necessarily freely associate your (full) name with it.
Would you have and care to share any perspective on these points: Privacy, and pseudonymity in order to at least loosely control the resulting... "graph" and perhaps unwanted discovery? (If not, no worries -- thought I'd ask, though.)
I do feel like most people my age do not care about privacy. I obsessively use and tune all the FB privacy controls, but I feel like most people don't know about them.
The appeal of pseudonyms on Tumblr has more to do with aspiration than privacy, I think. A lot of people younger than me (who I've FB stalked!) who use Tumblr use it like they use Pinterest: basically a collection of aspirational images. For example, a 16 year old guy might have a Tumblr that's full of pictures of sports cars, beautiful women, exotic locations, music artists that he likes, etc. There is certainly no actual blogging, because that requires lot's of writing. They'll typically have a tumblrID that has less to do with their name, and more to do with their identity. So someone who plays sports might have a tumblrID of "sportsguy123" (you get the picture).
From what I've noticed it seems that Facebook is definitely far less cool than twitter these days.